Dropping a Name (Or, Goodbye, John Wesley Harding)

There’s a rich tradition of fake names in rock music. Assuming them is easy: “I’m Elton John now!” “I’m Ringo Starr!” Getting rid of them is much harder: ask John Cougar (who had to ease into being John Mellencamp by slow degrees) or The Artist Formerly Known as Prince about the irreproducible hieroglyph that never caught on.

I have just got rid of one myself.

I’m the last person who should have bothered with a fake name in the first place. I didn’t need a Bowiesque persona, nor did I have a drab real name, but I did need a disguise, assuming that my “career” would tank in about two weeks, proving an embarrassing obstacle to a more attainable-seeming future in academia.

So “John Wesley Harding” it was, founded purely on the coincidence of my Christian name and a Bob Dylan album title. Both I and the cowboy John Wesley Hardin were named for the founder of the Methodist religion (though of the two of us, I’ve probably followed his teachings slightly more closely, having killed fewer people.) For some reason, Dylan misspelled Hardin “Harding”; no one knows why and to my knowledge no one’s ever bothered to ask. (My own favorite theory is that Dylan omitted so many “g”s from titles like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that he decided on a little restitution.)

And after a coincidentally precise 25 years, I have decided, for my new record, to ditch the tried and tested “John Wesley Harding” brand in favor of my real name. Why? I am hardly a household name, but whether you’re a Cougar, a Prince or a Harding (and unless you’re a Will Oldham who changes his name from Bonnie-Prince-this to Palace-Songs-that at the drop of a hat), it’s the sort of decision that doesn’t come lightly.

The reason is simple: I wrote a couple of autobiographical songs, and then I kept writing them. It was the first time that I’d ever bothered to write that kind of confessional song. All songs are autobiographical, but these were also true: things that happened to me. It wasn’t an aesthetic decision; it was something that just presented itself, because I was feeling low and stuck in hotel rooms on a dull book tour. I wrote to comfort myself; you could go so far to say, as a form of therapy.

In two of the very earliest, and two that (of the 60 or so I wrote) ended up among the 16 songs we recorded for the new record, I referred to myself as “Mr. Stace.” I was reporting facts and both times it was a direct quotation: once from this very newspaper which referred to me, in time-honored house style, as “Mr. Stace”(“One day they’ll put your picture in The New York Times/Now you call me Mister Stace”). The other quoted a valedictory phone conversation that ended with the phrase “Goodbye, Mr. Stace” (“You said Goodbye Mr. Stace/You didn’t need to explain/And I said goodbye Jane”). It seemed ridiculous to be Wesley Stace, call myself Wesley Stace, refer to myself in the songs as Wesley Stace and release the album under John Wesley Harding. So, that was decided. My move toward the personal might as well include a move away from the “persona.”

This move has been facilitated by the fact that I’ve been writing novels for the last 10 years under my real name: that decision was a no-brainer. The first novel, “Misfortune”, was a Dickensian kind of thing, and having the misspelled name of an outlaw on the spine would have been silly. That extracurricular use of my real name means that Wesley Stace has continued to exist on some level over there on the bookshelf. But it gets tiring having two names. Introductions to readings are too long anyway without that added complication: time to get it all under one roof.

The album is called “Self-Titled” for patently obvious reasons, apart from the fact that it’s an ideal title: I couldn’t think of another title, decided to let it be self-titled, and then decided that I should just call it Self-Titled. It seemed unlikely this hadn’t been done, but I haven’t found one yet.

What I had never realized is the more personal the song, the more specific the details, the more universal it all becomes. I think of it as The Ray Davies Conundrum: when he was singing about specific things in the 1960s, everybody knew what he was talking about, despite the Britishness; when he sang about big universal themes in the 1980s (Paranoia!), things that everyone already understood, generalisms, there was nothing to hang on to. And what you might call my emotional connection to the songs made me sing them in a more intimate way that required a more careful musical treatment – so a new sound came with the new songs: and the new softer sound feels more like me, too. I never used to like playing my songs in social situations; now I love it. I’ll get the guitar out at the drop of a hat, simply because it feels as if I’m playing a song that people might like to hear, a song they can relate to, as opposed to an idea or a story they can appreciate. It’s all, for better or for worse, about being me. Besides, you can still call me “Wes”: only people who don’t know me ever called me “John.” (You know who you are.) In fact, the whole thing’s a bit like when someone you know as Katy or Dave tells you they now want to be called “Katherine” or “David”: that’s who they are now. This is who I am. In fact, it’s all a great relief. I feel less fragmented.

The details in the songs are all true, as far as the rose-tinted spectacles of memory allow. The names, of course, have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. In fact, one thing you can tell is what the people the songs are actually about aren’t called. No one should be embarrassed (apart from me: it’s O.K. if I am). Thus “Goodbye Jane” is not about someone called Jane; “Lydia” is not about someone called Lydia; and so on.

Related

But a disguised name, or an unidentified “you,” isn’t always enough. One of the earliest of these songs told the story of a long on/off relationship, from the day I first met the woman in question to our friendship today: the whole story. I was so excited I sent its subject an iPhone demo, recorded in a hotel room, straightaway. She replied within the hour: “Wes, it’s beautiful; it’s so romantic; it’s exactly as I remember it; you can never ever record that song or sing it in public!” So I didn’t and haven’t. The lesson: never play a song to its subject, named or otherwise, until it’s mixed, mastered and released.

Another pleasant aspect of the songs is that I don’t need to explain them. It seems I’ve spent 25 years having people ask me what things mean: in itself quite flattering and a fine way to spend an interview; in reality, pretty boring. With these songs, no one needs to ask. Here’s a verse of “A Canterbury Kiss”:

We sat down beyond the bridge
Where we imagined ourselves hidden
A place where we could get away
With things otherwise forbidden
And we flipped through her box of records in our mind
It was the music and the summer sun combined

It means only what it says. There are no adjectives, no metaphors and nothing unclear – just my memory of that afternoon in Canterbury in 1982 or so, when I got a kiss from a girl for pretending I’d heard Jimi Hendrix. And this is one of the more flowery lyrics. That’s also why most of the songs are so short: I just wrote what I needed to remember and then that was that.

Elton John and I are surely among the only people in show business to have assumed the name John, as opposed to ditching it in favor of something more eye-catching. Elton’s still happy but, like Hank Snow (whose real name was Clarence) I’m moving on. There’s always that moment in the superhero movie when the hero reveals his identity to the girl: there’s no turning back then. You can’t unreveal it. I guess I did that with my novels; the rest was inevitable. I am now the artist formally known as Wesley Stace.

Wesley Stace is a novelist and musician, who has also recorded under the name John Wesley Harding. His debut album as Wesley Stace, “Self-Titled,” is planned for release in September. His next novel, “Wonderkid,” will be published in March.